17th century text analysis

This text is a recipe from the 17th century, pragmatically, the audience would be the woman of the household as she would be incharge of the family's meals. This recipe is from a book, it is fairly formal as it was written for the use of a book. The discourse structure is a sequenced list for both the whole text and the recipes in their singular entity, the recipes are listed off numerically showing there is a structured order and shows the difference between the separate recipes.

Graphologically, all the titles for each paragraph are in italics, this indicates the content of the recipe and allows the housewife to understand what it is that she is making, as there is no pictures this is the only indication of what the end product will be, this was the main indication of the time period due to the lack of technology, enabling photographs to be taken and printed into the recipe books. Each recipe begins with a space, this makes it clear that there is a new recipe to be followed. Within the text the 's' are written as 'f', at the time this was the way 's's were standardised this way. Another example of the change of standardisation in the written form of letters is the written from of 'w', within the text it is written as two 'v', this is a representation of the change over time as we have merged this two singular letters to cause a new standardisation of the letter 'w'.

The lexis is within the semantic field of food and cooking as this is a book with a wide range of recipes. Within the text there are lexis which have undergone a semantic shift into a negative field, ie the second recipe uses the ingredient 'Mutton', during this time period it would have been taking for its literal meaning of a meat, however over time the lexis has shifted in to negative space and is used to describe a woman who is old that is dressed like a tart in the phrase 'mutton dressed as lamb', this shows that over the time period it has taken negative connotations to change its meaning. The lexical choice of  'Calves feet'  represents the transiation of language and culture over time, this dish is no longer a part of the British palette, this may be due to a wider range of flavour accessible to us via trade and globalisation.

Grammatically, there are many features within the text that show the transition and transformation of language over time. As this text is from the 17th century grammar rules were few, therefore those who were able to write wrote as they wished. This is shown in the irregular capitalisation of nouns within the text. For example, 'Spinage' 'Mutton' 'beef-suet', the first two examples are capitalised in the text whereas the last example is not even though it is a noun, this shows the lack of rules within language and grammar of the time.The text is full of imperative and declarative sentences as it is a recipe, which is a list of instructions which are to be followed in order to get the correct end result.